The Counterfeiter
by The Secret Miracle
Summary: Cobb/Eames-as-Mal. Eames thinks this will help. Slash in theory, het in practice. M for intense sexual situations.


They are waiting, waiting for the younger Fischer to have surgery or even a dentist appointment, waiting for him to take his flight to LA, maybe even waiting for the elder Fischer to die. A few more days, and another few more days, the team almost can't take it any longer. They are wasting away in some swanky hotel in Sydney, stalking Fischer via newspaper clippings and TV reports and updates from the hotel concierge, to whom Saito has paid enough money to retire as soon as they no longer need his services.

Cobb can't sleep.

It is this waiting, it is the worrying and the planning and the WAITING and every time he blinks he sees Mal, it is getting worse worse worse. He has performed inception upon himself, unwittingly and unwillingly, and she has taken root in his mind, the most painful parasite, the most beautiful weed. Her hair curls in front of her bright eyes. "Aren't you happy to see me?"

"Of course I am." He has to take sedatives to sleep.

"Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux," she sings, softly, against the skin of his neck. "Je ne vois rien de mieux, même le bleu des cieux…"

"Mal."

"Yes?"

Waking up is cold.

They take uneasy meals together, in threes or fours: never just two and never all six. Ariadne eyes him as she polishes an apple on her jeans, looks away as she takes a bite. Her teeth break the skin with a crack, her lips touch its white flesh and are wet with its juice. Her hair is the same color as Mal's; Cobb has to leave.

He collapses into the bed which is too perfectly made with soft eggshell-white sheets and a tasteful tan comforter and his nose is too far into one of the beautifully soft pillows for him to breathe comfortably and his stubble is getting itchy and he's been wearing this shirt for too many days and he can't move. He breathes for a while. Mal's smile shows a little slice of white teeth.

Cobb drags himself out of bed and knocks on Yusuf's door and Yusuf gives him a little bottle of sedatives without saying anything. He knocks on Arthur's door and Arthur answers and looks opaque as ever.

"I need it," he tells Arthur.

Arthur stares at him, gives an almost imperceptible sigh and shake of his head. "You're losing control and this is not helping," he says, but he gets the metal suitcase with its gears and wires and tubes coiled tightly inside and hands it to Cobb anyway and Cobb takes it, feels its weight and familiar strange lightness and as his hands sweat he almost loses his grip on its handle, and he goes back to his room and pushes the door closed with his shoulder and feels like an addict.

Cobb fills the machine's belly full of honey colored sedatives and they swirl through its tendrils, mixing with the saline solution that is perpetually circulating in its system, and he rolls up his sleeve and winds a tourniquet around his arm and eases its special little needle tip into his skin. In the moment before he loses consciousness he almost hears the door to his room softly open and close, but he is already out and under and he is in their anniversary suite with Mal, the first time they were ever there, long before any glass ever crunched beneath his foot, long before he ever sat on its windowsill and felt the updrafts between the two wings of the hotel. Long before.

He returns to the room, balancing a dozen roses and a bottle of champagne and the top tier of their wedding cake, almost completely thawed now, though a little burned from a year of being in their freezer. She is reading a book on the sofa, she looks over the back of the sofa at him and smiles so comfortably and he is, as always, stunned at her beauty.

"I think it's a little cold still," he says sheepishly.

"We'll put it next to the window, the breeze is warm enough to thaw it out all the way." She opens the window and the curtains billow in the breeze and all of a sudden he is struck by a horrible blackness, but he recovers in a moment and hands her the cake, their fingertips touch and it is too much, her brilliant eyes and her soft lips and her uneven eyebrows. He kisses her.

She is the same but also different. He doesn't know how this can be, and he thinks something is vaguely wrong with this moment (had she ever opened the window before? Had she ever worn that dress before?) but now she is holding both of his shoulders with her slim delicate hands and now wrapping her arms around him and he crushes her to him, her waist and the smooth taut skin of her back and the nape of her neck with its soft tight curls.

She doesn't taste right, she doesn't smell right, she doesn't kiss right. He tries to hold on a moment longer, and another moment, and another, but it is wrong and he has to draw back and look at her, hands still on her warm shoulders.

"What?" she asks him and her accent is perfect and he almost falls for it.

"Get out of my dream."

Her brows furrow and she shakes her head but he knows better. "I don't understand."

"Eames. Stop it."

"What are you talking about?" Mal asks again, but her accent has slipped into an ugly British/French hybrid.

Cobb shoves her away and she stumbles, heels sinking into the thick carpet. "Do you think this is funny?" he can't help shouting at her. "What's wrong with you?"

Mal flinches and her mouth twists into a little grimace. "I was only. I was only trying to help—"

"This doesn't help." Cobb tries to make his tone acid but he knows he's only pleading; a penitent look flashes across Mal's lovely features.

"Look, maybe you need me to be more than a projection." Mal would never say "look" but her voice is perfect and Cobb wants her as badly as he hates Eames. This has the potential to be everything his projection of her isn't, truly sweet and fiery without maliciousness and god Cobb misses that more than anything. "Dom," she says.

And he kisses her again, he can't help himself; she smells too nice, lavender and sage and none of the sweet earthy sweat that always grounded her in his mind but he doesn't care right now, he can't, she is digging her fingertips into his neck and that too is wrong but he needs it and she is kissing him with her hot wet mouth and he kisses back.

Cobb unzips her dress and it slides off of her body and she is wrong, her stomach is too taut, her breasts are too round, her hips are too slim, and his breath catches in his throat with all of this wrongness but he somehow tells Eames (Mal) that she is less perfect and also more perfect and she has this little curve to her stomach and Mal (Eames) changes, almost imperceptibly, but she is there looking like she always did (does) and she even has the little freckle that is just off center above her bellybutton and he closes his eyes and kisses her again. He knows he is filling in all of the details with his own memories, Eames is giving him just enough of her that Cobb can fill in the rest and really believe it is her, for just a moment, for just this moment, for a moment and a moment more.

Her hands slide across his chest and slip his jacket off of his shoulders and she takes hold of his tie and uses it to pull him to her, her arm is wedged awkwardly between their bodies and he can feel the faintest brush of one of her breasts on one side of her arm against the fabric of his shirt and he eases her towards the bed, she steps out of her heels and loses a few inches and has to crane her neck a little more to kiss him, and he is careful to avoid stepping on her bare feet and he remembers that these are Eames's feet, not Mal's, and he pushes her (him) onto the bed with a flash of disgust.

He asks himself how he can do this.

He asks himself how he can stop himself from doing this.

Her fingers curl around empty air, she is pale and bare, her eyebrows are questioning but her pupils are huge and dark and her lips are parted and a little wet. She props herself up on her elbows. Her legs hang off the edge of the bed and her knees are separated just enough that Cobb's gaze travels to the shadowed place between her thighs and he kneels before her, eases her legs apart, kisses her stomach and the hot insides of her thighs and he realizes that he is filling in these details because he needs them and he pauses but she arches her back and he licks her and she's wet and tastes a little sweet and a little bitter, like sweat and something clean yet still natural, still animal.

He holds her legs still and delves his tongue into her, and she writhes and makes a little "oh" sound with her head tipped back, he inhales and curls his tongue inside until she is shaking. He glances along her body and her hips and stomach and the way her breasts slope to each side when she's on her back, her knuckles whitening as she clutches the sheets on either side of her, it is all so familiar and if he allows himself to forget the wrongness he can fill in the gaps with what he knows of her, what he remembers of her, so she is perfect and imperfect and so hotly alive, and she tenses around his tongue and she comes, body twitching, legs curling him closer, her beautiful neck obscenely long as it's thrown back, making soft noises in her throat.

"Oh," she says, after a still moment, and he gets on top of her and her slim trembling fingers unbutton his shirt and slide his tie over his head and run down his chest, paler than his skin is, and she lifts herself up a little to kiss him; his lips are too wet and he knows she can taste herself on him. Another little jolt runs through Cobb's body, like a myoclonic jerk, a realization of _this is not Mal_ but he can't let himself think that right now. She unbuckles his belt.

Cobb kicks his shoes off, awkwardly, and together they slide his expensive dress pants off and he is still wearing his unbuttoned shirt but it doesn't matter, she positions herself under him and snakes one hand between them. She looks into his eyes and smiles, lips parted, as she slides him into her. He can't stop himself from choking out a little cry, his eyes flicker closed but he opens them because she is so beautiful, hair tousled, cheeks a little flushed, dark liquid eyes searching his face. "Dom," she says with her full lips and muted accent.

And she hooks her legs around his back, hips pressing into his stomach, breasts swelling against his chest with every breath, and then she shifts her weight and rolls him over and she's on top of him, heels digging uncomfortably into his back beneath their combined weight before she slides her legs to the sides to straddle him, knees pressing on each side of his ribcage, and her hair makes a curtain around their faces when she brings them almost close enough to kiss. Her eyes are porcelain, bright white painted with blue flowers. She brushes her tongue against his lips just briefly, and then sits up and arches her back and holds both of his wrists by her thighs as she fucks him. He is torn between the knowledge that this is not Mal, this is not even his projection of Mal, this is Eames looking like Mal, which is horrifying in several ways not the least of which is that he is having sex with Eames, but on the other hand this is Mal and she is sweeter and more responsive and unpredictable in a way where he isn't afraid of her, he can allow himself to feel comfortable with her even though it isn't her and she rolls her head forward to look at him and he can't hold back any longer, he comes and she lets him, riding it out until he shudders his last and his eyes flicker open and she smiles at him, amused and self-satisfied and still Mal, lovely, glowing with a sheen of sweat, hair tousled, one hand ghosting up one arm and across his shoulder to brush her hot fingertips along his unshaven bristly jawline.

"Mal," he says, he can't help himself, and she kisses him deeply, flicking her tongue just below his upper lip. She edges her body up, then, slowly, and they both breathe in a quick little breath, wince slightly, as she eases him out of her and they are separate people again. He is barely conscious again before she rolls off of him and is gone, shifting him to the side as her weight vanishes off of the mattress.

Eames awakens to Edith Piaf regretting nothing. He hooks the headphones around his neck and presses a cotton ball to his arm to ease the needle out. He blinks himself into reality for a moment. Cobb is still slumped on his side on the hotel bed, mouth open slightly and kind of drooling a little, eyelashes fluttering as he dreams.

Eames fucking scarpers.

He gets a stare from a beautiful auburn-haired woman in a fancy dress as his disheveled brightly-shirted self almost bumps into her in the hallway; he double-takes but he doesn't recognize her on second glance. He wishes he could wake up looking as slick as Arthur always seems to.

The door to his room seems to close softly behind him even though he tries to slam it. He splashes his face with cold water from the fancy ultra-modern-looking tap in this posh fucking hotel and makes a couple of faces at himself in the mirror, making sure he knows how to control his own countenance as well as he can control those he counterfeits.

He doesn't want Cobb to knock on his door. He wants Cobb to knock on his door. He wants Cobb to come in and confront him.

The door knocks.

"Eames?" Cobb opens the door and sticks his head into the bathroom where Eames is still dripping and looking in the mirror. It is his reflection until Eames turns around with a dry towel in his hands. It is only when looking at the real Cobb that he sees the sleep-deprivation bruises that curve under each of Cobb's eyes.

"Look, I was only trying to help—"

Cobb hits him. It's like a camera flash, except instead of saying cheese and blinking spots out of his vision his left eye socket is aching and he's suddenly looking at the sink instead of at Cobb and regaining his balance before he even realizes he had lost it for a second. The mirror is spotted with drops of water that scattered off of his face; Cobb's knuckles are white and wet.

"You may be the best counterfeiter I've ever met but I didn't bring you into this team so you could fuck with _my_ head. What gives you the right?"

"I know I'm the only person who can give you what you want but I don't need to, I can leave you and your fucking crazy projection girlfriend—" Eames's jaw snaps to the side and the taste of blood washes over his tongue. Cobb hits him again, the dull thud of his fist against Eames's cheek echoes against the smooth inside of the fancy hotel bathtub. Eames's blood sprays across the floor.

Cobb stops. He stares at his bloodied knuckles. Eames wants him to continue, to take his anger at Mal or himself or whoever out on Eames so he can get the fuck over it but Cobb reins himself in. His face has lost its angry squint, its bared teeth. Now he just looks tired. And Eames tries to suppress the urge which led him to this whole stupid half-formed plan in the first place, the urge that makes him forget all his compunctions, his misgivings, his carefully constructed barriers of nonchalance and acquaintanceship and self-control, and most of all his knowledge that Cobb's only love is Mal, there is no place for Eames here.

Cobb closes the door as he leaves. Eames stares after him and spits a little bit of blood onto the floor. The bruise around his eye is beginning to swell, he can feel every beat of his heart in his raw lower lip. There is nothing more he can say, and nothing at all he can do.

He knocks on Arthur's door and Arthur answers, stern and perfect and completely fucking impenetrable. "Can I come in?"


End file.
